"Krausening" to increase IBU at bottling

I have a batch fermenting that I was planning to dry-hop but decided I wanted to actually increase the bitterness. I was thinking of doing the following process based on this answer which I think qualifies as something close to krausening (albeit somewhat defeating the historical purpose):

  • Steep specialty grains in a small amount of water (maybe a quart to a half gallon)
    • Doing this instead of using DME is the key thing I'm unsure about, but I have priming sugar already and some extra grains that I was thinking this could be a good use for
  • Add most (if not all) of the priming sugar I would normally add and bring to a boil
  • Add hops that would have been used for dry-hopping and boil for an hour
  • Cool, add to bottling bucket, and proceed as normal

Are there any major downsides or oversights in this approach?

Topic krausening bottle-conditioning bittering homebrew

Category Mac

1
answered at

The term krausen, refers to the head formed during fermentation.

I guess I'm unclear as to why you would try to make a mini wort batch by steeping grains. The sugars from steeping are mostly unfermentable long chain sugars having not been converted by enzymes as they would in a mash. These will carry through and taste as underattenuation or sweet, offsetting IBU even further.

If increasing the IBU post boil is the only goal. Just simmer (low boil) your hops in water for 45 min, that will give maximum alpha extraction. Filter through a coffee filter while hot, and Add priming surgar. Add to your wort once cooled.

1
answered at

Steeping caramel / crystal malts in water may still extract fermentables. As far as I know up to about 30% of what you would get from mash. See this site - it claims that Special B will give out a lot of sugar. If I read the numbers correctly, every 3 grams of steeped Special B will introduce about 1 gram of fermentables. Substitute grams for any unit of mass, doesn't matter.

To avoid adding sugars, you should rather steep very light, base malts, with no starch converted in malting house, or black ones with sugars already burnt past being sugars.

For hops, increasing bitternes is not something you have to do instead of dry hoping for aroma. You can do both.

For hop utilization, and sugar calculations consider adding "normal" sugar after boil, when used hops are already separated. Sugar from specialty malts should be enough for hop utilization chemistry, and losing some sugar with used hop matter will mess with your calculations, too. It will not be a big change, but oh well.

TL;DR:

  1. Count steeped Special B as priming sugar worth 1/3 mass.
  2. You can both dry-hop and do your procedure

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